Abstract
Derek Walcott is a Caribbean islander, a friend of fishermen, a haunter of beaches and, despite his gift for conviviality, knows solitude. He encountered Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe quite early, as a terrifying image of despair reproduced in a primary-school reader.1 ‘Teacher Alix son’ was always a voracious reader and, after leaving St Lucia, read widely in English literature for an Arts degree at what was then the University College of the West Indies, Mona, governed by the decrees and syllabuses of the University of London. The figure of Defoe’s castaway turns up powerfully in early poems, shadows passages of Omeros (1990) and provides the central substance of the 1978 theatrical two-hander Pantomime2 which is the subject of this chapter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993) p. 256 ff.
A. Valdman, Le Creole (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978) p. 165 ff.
Gordon Rohlehr, My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port of Spain: Longman Trinidad, 1992) p. 9.
Stewart Brown (ed.) The Art of Derek Walcott (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991).
Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Eloge de la Creolite, (Paris: Gallimard/Presses Universitaires Creoles, 1989)
John Reinecke et al., A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975)
Kemlin Ching, ‘Trinidad English – The Origin of “Mamaguy” and “Picong“’, Caribbean Quarterly, 17/2 (June 1971) 36–9.
Rex Nettleford, ‘Fifty Years of the Jamaican Pantomime 1941–1991’, Jamaica Journal, 24/3 (February 1993) 2–9.
Daryl Dance (ed.) Fifty Caribbean Writers (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986).
Keith Q. Warner, The Trinidad Calypso (London: Heinemann, 1982)
Derek Walcott’s ‘Pantomime’, World Literature Written in English, 26/1 (1986) 169–77.
Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993)
J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 1987) p. 118.
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (1966; London, 1978) p. 240.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jones, B. (1996). ‘With Crusoe the slave and Friday the boss’: Derek Walcott’s Pantomime. In: Spaas, L., Stimpson, B. (eds) Robinson Crusoe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13677-3_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13677-3_17
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-13679-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-13677-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)